A randomly comprehensive survey of extraordinary movie experiences from the art house to the grindhouse, featuring the good, the bad, the ugly, but not the boring or the banal.

Monday, August 31, 2015

Wes Craven (1939-2015)

Without necessarily being a great filmmaker, Craven was a historic figure in the horror genre. What set him apart from other horror directors was an evolving sensibility that resulted in him making three very different game-changing films over a quarter-century. The first was the reputedly Ingmar Bergman-inspired Last House on the Left (1972), which not only set a new standard for relentless cruelty but also inspired the epochal "Repeat to yourself: It's only a movie..." ad campaign. In 1984 Craven made A Nightmare on Elm Street and created Freddy Krueger, giving the era's serial-killer boogeymen a new glib irreverence that made Freddy a cultural icon and aligned him with the subversive TV horror hosts of yore, so that it was natural for Freddy to became one. Finally, at nearly a polar remove from Last House on the Left, came Scream (1996), a film that was arguably more immediately influential on the horror genre than anything Craven had done before. Resented by some fans, Scream was a definitive pop horror film, as much a crowd pleaser as a crowd spooker. Scream 2 was more of the same and a much underrated film, one of the most purely entertaining sequels ever. The third Scream couldn't keep up the pace and Craven declined from there, with the modest thriller Red-Eye the only real highlight of his last decade. His record as director and producer was decidedly mixed -- the "Wes Craven Presents" tag never really inspired confidence -- but his three milestone films, augmented by many more obscure fan favorites and sleepers, make his place in movie history pretty secure.